MAC / Windows incompatibility

[bugaloo]

Recently I've been working with a company that designs in Photoshop on a MAC.
When they send me a PSD file I can't open it in Windows.

It says, "Could not open the document because it is not a valid Photoshop document."

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[bugaloo]

Recently I've been working with a company that designs in Photoshop on a MAC.
When they send me a PSD file I can't open it in Windows.

It says, "Could not open the document because it is not a valid Photoshop document."

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance.

[Erik Heyninck]

Use .TIFF, that is cross platform.

[bugaloo]

Thanks, but I still need the file to contain layers.

[Mark (theKeeper)]

Sounds like it may be a version conflict problem...? Are you both using the same version of PS? (And with the same upDate patches, etc.)

Have you checked Adobe's forum? If you're using PS6 then there may be a list of known issues/OS compatibility bugs there.

Other than that, i can't tell where the problem might be coming from.

PS: perhaps check to see that the sender *isn't* ticking off any 'specific' preferences when they save out their copy of the file to send to you. They may be choosing a Mac specific preference.

Just another thought [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

Mark...

[Beth]

I transfer stuff all the time between platforms. Maybe as Mark said it is a preference or a version conflict. But from my experience, the version number doesnt usually affect the file transfer (although you may have issues with fonts and effects).

Make sure you have the PSD extension to the file. If it is not there, you can simply edit the file name and add .psd to the end of it.

Another possibility is that the file was corrupted during file transfer (if it was over the net). Mac files are notoriously bad for this kind of thing. Mac files are basically a two part thing...a data fork and a resource fork. The data fork is the guts of the file, while the resource fork is a file database that tells the mac which ap the file was created in (and hence which ap to open up in). Windows on the otherhand knows how to open up files according to the extensions. A much better system. Especially since the resource fork is so suspeptible to corruption during file transfer....even between two macs. Mac people pretty well need to compress everything they send over the internet in some kind of archive like a .sit or .sea file (similar to .zip). And it is probably even safer to binhex the compressed file.

So in short (guess too late for that)
1. check the file name
2. ask for the file to be resent with proper compression. (winzip will open up the .sit files)